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Feb. 3, 1986/The Point News -3
B
Why go to college? As a composition teacher, I see
student after student wrestle with that question. This
column gives me a chance to share some of the
observations I have had, along with some comments and
possible answers.
First a word on my vantage point. Composition is a
unique class at the college because in no other class are
students required to provide such a large percentage of
the subject matter. In few other classes do teachers get
to know students so well. And for that reason composition
teachers are often pitied. Here we must confront, instead
of the subject matter that sent us soaring in graduate
school the "vapid lives" of our students, presented to us
in the form of weekly, 3-5 page, double-spaced papers.
At times receiving those papers is indeed a sobering
experience. A stack of papers can work like a black hole,
sucking energy out of the professor who is looking for
energy and excitement and instead gets 22 versions of
what people think the professor wants, written with all
the commitment of a decadent aristocrat. The professor
picks up the first paper with dread, and by the end of a
3 or 4 hour grading session has discovered that dread was
too mild an anticipation. More than any other course,
composition can cause premature aging.
It s h o u l d n’t be like this in a class where students
can write on whatever they want. But composition teachers
learn early in the trade that to ask for an open topic is
afte-Ti to get variants of topics assigned in high school
classes that the students agree were "boring." So the
teacher tries a variant and says, "You can't write on a
subject unless you find it interesting," and gets
students who say they d o n’t know what they find
interesting and they d o n’t know why t h e y’re in college
(it all starts coming out at this point) and they d o n’t
know what they want to do with their lives (except,
maybe, to make a lot of money). They are riddled with
anxieties of various hues and composition becomes, for a
good half of the course, almost a psychotherapy session,
in which the teachers try to convince students that
commitment is possible and that life is worth exploring.
So what is to blame? Needless to say, a lot of
finger pointing goes on. College teachers blame the high
schools (which blame the middle schools which blame the
elementary schools, and everyone blames the parents).
There are technological villians , everything from the
boob tube to the atom bomb. And the students come in for
their share of the blame: students are lazy, they just
want to party, they are shallow, etc.
Students have their own explanations: teachers are
boring, the subject matter is irrelevant to their own
concerns, the classroom situation is somehow alienating,
the college environment as a whole is artificial (unlike
the so-called "real" world). Not infrequently, the
students accept the teachers’ evaluation: they blame
themselves, compounding the problem by saying they are
lazy, irresponsible, worthless.
But all this finger pointing d o e s n’t solve anything,
and instead begins to sound like the incessant whine of a
axle which has never been greased. The axle is still
attached to the wagon, and it still turns—some kind of
education, in other words, still goes on. And even though
the irrition takes a toll on everybody’s nerves, it is
not so bad that people feel like they have to upset the
cart in order to change it. What is needed is a
perceptual shift so radical that the squeaking of the
wheel no longer seems like a mere fact of life but is
recognized as intolerable. Then maybe people will try to
figure out how to take control of the situation.
In order to facilitate this perceptual shift, I will
give a vision of what education could be, but what it
seldom is. Two of the most spectacular educational
success stories in world history are the literacy
campaigns which followed the Cuban and the Nicaraguan
revolutions. Without getting into the overall successes
or failures of those revolutions, the point to be made is
that an entire population dedicated itself to becoming
literate—teachers put up with austerity conditions,
students with tough mental labor—because all were seized
with a sense of social purpose which made education seem
vital. In an amazingly short amount of time, people who
had never seen a book were reading. The results of the
campaign are testimony to what people can do when they
believe in their task.
Now back to America. If I have to spend half a
course persuading my composition students that writing is
worth doing, and convincing my literary topics students
that literature is worth reading, my English majors that
18th-century British literature, with its difficult prose
style, is worth struggling with, then there has been a
tragic waste of time and energy. What is most tragic is
that the waste is often not even recognized.
So what to do? We c a n’t count on revolution. The
only president I ’ve seen that seems to have come close
See VIEWPOINT, page 4
PHOTO BY JOSEPH NORRIS
By ROBIN BATES

Feb. 3, 1986/The Point News -3
B
Why go to college? As a composition teacher, I see
student after student wrestle with that question. This
column gives me a chance to share some of the
observations I have had, along with some comments and
possible answers.
First a word on my vantage point. Composition is a
unique class at the college because in no other class are
students required to provide such a large percentage of
the subject matter. In few other classes do teachers get
to know students so well. And for that reason composition
teachers are often pitied. Here we must confront, instead
of the subject matter that sent us soaring in graduate
school the "vapid lives" of our students, presented to us
in the form of weekly, 3-5 page, double-spaced papers.
At times receiving those papers is indeed a sobering
experience. A stack of papers can work like a black hole,
sucking energy out of the professor who is looking for
energy and excitement and instead gets 22 versions of
what people think the professor wants, written with all
the commitment of a decadent aristocrat. The professor
picks up the first paper with dread, and by the end of a
3 or 4 hour grading session has discovered that dread was
too mild an anticipation. More than any other course,
composition can cause premature aging.
It s h o u l d n’t be like this in a class where students
can write on whatever they want. But composition teachers
learn early in the trade that to ask for an open topic is
afte-Ti to get variants of topics assigned in high school
classes that the students agree were "boring." So the
teacher tries a variant and says, "You can't write on a
subject unless you find it interesting," and gets
students who say they d o n’t know what they find
interesting and they d o n’t know why t h e y’re in college
(it all starts coming out at this point) and they d o n’t
know what they want to do with their lives (except,
maybe, to make a lot of money). They are riddled with
anxieties of various hues and composition becomes, for a
good half of the course, almost a psychotherapy session,
in which the teachers try to convince students that
commitment is possible and that life is worth exploring.
So what is to blame? Needless to say, a lot of
finger pointing goes on. College teachers blame the high
schools (which blame the middle schools which blame the
elementary schools, and everyone blames the parents).
There are technological villians , everything from the
boob tube to the atom bomb. And the students come in for
their share of the blame: students are lazy, they just
want to party, they are shallow, etc.
Students have their own explanations: teachers are
boring, the subject matter is irrelevant to their own
concerns, the classroom situation is somehow alienating,
the college environment as a whole is artificial (unlike
the so-called "real" world). Not infrequently, the
students accept the teachers’ evaluation: they blame
themselves, compounding the problem by saying they are
lazy, irresponsible, worthless.
But all this finger pointing d o e s n’t solve anything,
and instead begins to sound like the incessant whine of a
axle which has never been greased. The axle is still
attached to the wagon, and it still turns—some kind of
education, in other words, still goes on. And even though
the irrition takes a toll on everybody’s nerves, it is
not so bad that people feel like they have to upset the
cart in order to change it. What is needed is a
perceptual shift so radical that the squeaking of the
wheel no longer seems like a mere fact of life but is
recognized as intolerable. Then maybe people will try to
figure out how to take control of the situation.
In order to facilitate this perceptual shift, I will
give a vision of what education could be, but what it
seldom is. Two of the most spectacular educational
success stories in world history are the literacy
campaigns which followed the Cuban and the Nicaraguan
revolutions. Without getting into the overall successes
or failures of those revolutions, the point to be made is
that an entire population dedicated itself to becoming
literate—teachers put up with austerity conditions,
students with tough mental labor—because all were seized
with a sense of social purpose which made education seem
vital. In an amazingly short amount of time, people who
had never seen a book were reading. The results of the
campaign are testimony to what people can do when they
believe in their task.
Now back to America. If I have to spend half a
course persuading my composition students that writing is
worth doing, and convincing my literary topics students
that literature is worth reading, my English majors that
18th-century British literature, with its difficult prose
style, is worth struggling with, then there has been a
tragic waste of time and energy. What is most tragic is
that the waste is often not even recognized.
So what to do? We c a n’t count on revolution. The
only president I ’ve seen that seems to have come close
See VIEWPOINT, page 4
PHOTO BY JOSEPH NORRIS
By ROBIN BATES